Archives for 2010

The journal Current Biology has a special review issue on the global genetic history of Homo sapiens. The articles are written for a fairly technical audience, but if it's a topic you're interested in, you might want to check it out. All of the articles are available online for free.
Archaeogenetics — ...

People chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus currently have only one treatment option: a combination of polyethylene glycol (PEG)-ylated interferon alpha and ribavirin (RBV). Not only does this drug regimen fail to eradicate the virus in about half of all patients who receive it, but even when it ...

Group of hunters from the Ju/’hoansi tribe in the Namibian Bush/ Stephan C. Schuster
Researchers from Penn State University, the University of New South Wales in Australia, and the Baylor College of Medicine have sequenced the genomes of four individuals from different groups of the click-speaking San of ...

The candles on your birthday cake tell you how many years you've lived through, but they might not be a reflection of your biological age.
Little bits of DNA called telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes. Over time, through repeated rounds of cell division, telomeres get shorter and shorter. Thus, ...

Artist's impression of Inuk based on genetic analysis
Nuka Godfredsen/Nature
Editor's note: This post has been edited from the original to reflect changes in 23andMe's product.
Tufts of hair rescued from the permafrost in Greenland and then tucked away in a basement in Denmark for more than 20 years have ...

Faces of America is a four-part series in which Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. uses genealogy and genetics to explore the family histories of 12 renowned Americans in an effort to understand what made the United States the place it is today.
The list of participants includes:
Elizabeth ...

There's no doubt that blood saves lives. According to the Red Cross, in the United States alone about five million people need a total of 14 million pints of blood each year. That's 38,000 pints every day.
But transfusions are not without their dangers. Among them is transfusion-related acute lung ...

Warfarin (Coumadin®) is a blood thinner given to people at high risk for the formation of blood clots due to conditions such as deep vein thrombosis, heart valve disease or replacement, and irregular heart beat. The drug is also given to prevent recurrence of pulmonary embolism, heart attack and stroke.
If ...

Cancer of the pancreas, which strikes more than 40,000 men and women in the United States each year, is an especially deadly malignancy. There is no effective screening test for the disease and it is usually not detected until it has spread throughout the body. The five-year survival rate is only about ...

By Nick Eriksson, 23andMe Principal Scientist, and Lizzie Dorfman, Parkinson's Research Project Manager
Less than a year ago we announced the launch of the 23andMe Parkinson’s Research Initiative. Since then, we have built one of the world's most useful resources for studying the genetics of Parkinson's ...

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